Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these. Mee's contexts are less literal: they concern the characteristic rhetorics, preoccupations and discourses of the 1790s which relate to Blake's concerns and which perhaps help us to understand them.

LRB 28 January 1993 | PDF Download